All you need to know about 2024
A president:
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"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2023
And Mankind’s folly
Ahead of the Memorial Day holiday, a book arrived unexpectedly from an old friend. John Nation writes about his exploration of WWI battlefields in France in “A Nomad in No Man’s Land.” It began with a simple road sign, Ligne du Front–“Front Line.” The Somme battlefield.
Brian Klaas reflects today on his recent visit to Normandy cemeteries.
“From the beginning, then, there was a tension” in memorials to the Confederate war dead, Klaas writes, “between paying respects to those who had died—the sons and fathers and brothers—and a debate over whether you could ever separate out the injustice of a war’s cause from those who fought in it. For some, the answer was absolutely not. After all, Confederate soldiers fought to keep others enslaved, one of the great stains on human history.”
Above the WWII beaches in Normandy stand memorials to the “sheer scale of that human tragedy” that occurred there marked by row upon row of white marble headstones: 9,387 in the Allied cemetery. The Nazi cemetary, Klaas expplains, “is dark and black. The gravestones are cut from a rough, plain brown/black stone, a striking juxtaposition with the pristine white marble”: 21,222 German soldiers buried in a field off a busy two-lane highway, both “perpetrators and victims,” Klaas observes:
Even if we accept that a 17 year-old conscript bears less moral responsibility than a 40 year-old Waffen-SS officer, there can be social utility in ignoring that nuance in pursuit of reinforcing the more important message: that the Nazi scourge must never repeat itself.
These are the moral wrinkles brought to the surface by warfare. Social science research from the Milgram Experiment to studies of brainwashing and propaganda, has demonstrated how seemingly ordinary people can commit extraordinarily brutal acts. If you study authoritarianism, as I do, it’s impossible to miss this complexity. Ideology, it turns out, is the catalyst of mass atrocities, and when it’s at its most potent, as in totalitarian states, few are immune from its poison. How would you behave today if you had been born into a family in North Korea?
This is not to absolve perpetrators, or the regimes they fight for, but to better understand them—and to understand how a 17 year-old German teenager ends up dead in a cemetery in France.
The casualties at the Battle of the Somme were even more horrific.
We share a terrible legacy, including that of the war that ended slavery, and for which this country has never fully come to grips. A century and half later, that itching scab has left many of our embittered countrymen itching for another.
Klaas warns:
Wars sometimes become necessary—to defend innocents from horrific aggression wrought by tyrants and dictators. But as we remember the sacrifice of the brave, we must also remember the broader lessons: that totalitarian, fascist ideologies are a scourge of our species and that the human cost of wars is a nauseating waste.
The front lines are not inside the Beltway, says David Pepper
“The battle for democracy is a long battle,” says David Pepper, former Ohio Democratic chair.
It is harder for Democrats to win with election-cycle thinking, I’d argue, and because they always seem to be fighting the last war with the wrong weapons. More on that later.
Paul Rosenberg provides a Salon interview with David Pepper following the release of “Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American.” (It’s on my to-do list.) Pepper wrote it as a follow-up to “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines” because so many readers (as I did) skipped to the end to look for answers to Pepper’s all-too-familiar diagnosis of where the reactionary right is taking the country.
“Team D” and “Team A” are fighting different battles, Pepper argues. Small-d democrats still believe the answer to pushing back on the autocrats is about electoral victories at the federal level. Then they win them they discover “that they weren’t really victories.”
Why not? As I wrote in 2016:
I live in a state taken over by a T-party legislature that has passed one of the worst voter ID bills in the country, drafted absolutely diabolical redistricting maps, passed HB2 as a get-out-the-vote tool, and launches regular legislative attacks against our cities where the largest block of blue votes are. President Bernie isn’t going to fix that for me. Neither is President Hillary. And not in Michigan or Wisconsin either. We have to beat them ourselves. Here, not in the Electoral College.
Team A, says Pepper, knows its agenda is deeply unpopular. They do not represent a majority and know it. Secondly, they know democracy can be undermined and have fought a long war to rule as a minority in state after state.
To win that long war, Team D must first gain ground in the provinces, in all 50 states.
“But you never win if if you’re not there. This is how you take on the extremism, by getting in a strong counter-push in all the states. Right now this doesn’t exist because everything is about a swing state now,” Pepper says. You must be present to win. The front lines in this long war are in state legislatures and local school board races, not inside the Beltway:
The fact that 50% of the Tennessee Republicans who voted out the two Justins didn’t even have an election last November explains so much of their behavior. This is a crisis across the country. Once you have no election where the public actually has a choice, and the politicians know that, the effect on these people’s incentive warps them completely. You have an incentive to be an extremist as opposed to mainstream. You have an incentive against public service, because the public really doesn’t matter anymore. The private players in your statehouse matter more. So the warping of democracy when so many of these people face no democracy, no accountability — we’re seeing it play out.
Discontent over North Carolina Democrats forfeiting 44 of 170 legislative seats in 2022 is why Anderson Clayton, 25, became the youngest Democratic state chair in February. Because she got mad about it. A majority of the state party activists agreed. She’s working to contest every race in 2024, saying, “Democracy isn’t democracy unless you have choices on a ballot.”
Pepper concurs:
It’s truly a crisis that we have millions and millions of Americans living in a world with no democracy at the state level, and that is leading to the downward spiral of extremism. I mentioned this earlier: In a district with no opposition, all the incentives of your time and power are warped. You are serving an extremist agenda, because that’s how you avoid a primary. That’s why a new mindset is of paramount importance: We have to run against them everywhere and build an infrastructure that values running everywhere, which is something we do not have right now. So I call it a crisis: In a mindset where you largely care about federal swing states, you don’t see this is a crisis. This is seen as how it works. We have to change that.
As Rosenberg usually concludes, he asks, “What’s the most important question I haven’t asked, and what’s the answer?”
Pepper replies, in part:
Right now, we too often accept the smaller electorate that is a result of purging and voter suppression, because our political operations only talk to the most frequent voters. That ends up leaving so many others out. It’s critical that as we use our full footprints to lift democracy, we find as many ways as possible to engage the voters that have essentially been removed from the political conversation. That’s why community organizations and effective precinct organizing are so important. They allow us to get to folks who are too often left unengaged by standard political operations and campaigns.
This is my focus right now. Independents (UNAffiliated voters in NC) are the largest bloc of registered voters in NC: 36% (2.6 million voters). But statewide they voted against Democrats here 58% of the time in the last two elections. Democrats cannot win without them, but their traditional tactics, as Pepper recognizes, focuses only on “the most frequent voters.” This tactic leaves many “removed from the political conversation” in what I’ve dubbed “No Voter’s Land.” These are voters campaigns are reluctant to contact (using the tactics of the last war, you might say) because computer scoring deems them not good bets.
In a sense, Democrats believes low-scoring UNAs are (in Seinfeld terms) not sponge-worthy. It’s not that they won’t vote with Democrats, it’s that Democrats lack the data to give them confidence that they might, so they cautiously avoid them. Republicans do the same.
If Democrats focus their voter contact efforts on the bluest 30% of UNAffiliateds, and the GOP focuses theirs on the reddest 30%, who’s inviting the middle 40% to participate in our elections? 40% of 2.6 million voters is a lot of voters to ignore.
There are plenty of places out there “where the fishing is good.” It’s just that Democrats don’t bother casting nets there. This has to change. They won’t win using the tactics of the last war with the wrong weapons.
There are a lot of legal cases against Trump pending right now and you would think that a billionaire front runner for the Republican nomination would have the very best legal talent that money can buy. But, as we know, he is the worst client in the world because he doesn’t pay and won’t shut his pie hole so his legal bench is D-list at best.
Here’s a rundown:
[Y]ou would think a client facing that amount of legal peril would have a top-notch team of lawyers in place to defend him. But when you have a client like Trump, normal expectations don’t apply.
Just recently attorney Tim Parlatore announced — very publicly, via voluntarily testifying for the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation — that he was resigning from the Trump legal team, allegedly because of his inability to provide the right kind of counsel to Trump due to obstacles created by fellow Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn. Parlatore claims that Epshteyn was keeping him and other lawyers from being able to speak to Trump and that Epshteyn was not being honest with their client.
Interestingly, it was just a few months ago that Parlatore was singing Epshteyn’s praises, according to the New York Times, whom he told, “It’s good to have someone who’s a lawyer who is also inside the palace gates.” It doesn’t bode well that only a few months after that, Parlatore publicly derided Epshteyn and said Epshteyn was gatekeeping the rest of the legal team from accessing their one client (Trump.)
Parlatore isn’t the only attorney on Trump’s Keystone Cops legal team to throw up the white flag.
Parlatore also went after fellow Trump attorney Joe Tacopina for what Parlatore said was a “potential conflict of interest” in Tacopina representing Trump in the New York District Attorney’s Office Stormy Daniels hush money criminal case. At one time, Daniels had contacted Tacopina about possibly representing her and Parlatore questioned openly on cable news whether Tacopina was the “right” attorney to represent Trump at trial.
Although Epshteyn has been referred to as Trump’s in-house counsel, Parlatore told the New York Times he has reportedly little documented legal experience, including none in the criminal defense arena. Epshteyn has created a name for himself in MAGA circles for being a political strategist, for his combative style and for his access to Trump. Trump also has apparently given Epshteyn the ability to hire and fire attorneys.
Parlatore isn’t the only attorney on Trump’s Keystone Cops legal team to throw up the white flag. Evan Corcoran, who was Trump’s lead attorney regarding the Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation, resigned from that role after being subpoenaed by the Justice Department to testify before a federal grand jury. Granted, Corcoran remains on the global legal team as counsel for Trump, but it isn’t a commonplace occurrence for an attorney to end up being compelled by way of court order to testify before a grand jury regarding conduct committed by a client. Lest Corcoran feel lonely, though, Parlatore has also provided testimony before Jack Smith’s federal grand jury for his role in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. However, Parlatore chose to appear voluntarily before the grand jury without the need for a subpoena to give testimony about how additional document searches were conducted at other Trump properties.
Pat A. Cipollone, former Trump White House counsel and deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin have also testified before a federal grand jury about Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Oh, and Epshteyn? He has testified before Fani Willis’ Fulton County special grand jury regarding Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Corcoran also has the dubious honor of being the subject of piercing attorney-client privilege because of the crime-fraud exception for his communications — both written and verbal — with Trump. The successful application of the crime-fraud exception is rare. A few federal judges, as well as some appellate court judges, have found that there was sufficient evidence of criminal activity afoot. If I was Corcoran, I would vacate the premises of Trump World in its entirety. I am of course not counsel to Corcoran, although to be clear, several Trump lawyers have had to retain their own lawyers due to their representation of Trump. The newest iteration of “MAGA” might as well now stand for “Making Attorneys Get Attorneys.”
Notable examples include Christina Bobb, who was interviewed by the FBI for her role in signing off on the certification representing that there were no more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, despite further evidence proving that certification was not true. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal counsel, has had to retain several lawyers because of his own exposure, both criminal and civil, after representing Trump over the years.
Let’s also not forget other former Trump lawyers like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and John Eastman, all of whom are facing ethics complaints affecting their ability to practice law in various jurisdictions, as well as several investigations for their roles as Trump’s counsel. In some instances and depending upon the findings by various referees and judges in these different jurisdictions that are investigating former Trump lawyers, these attorneys could lose their licenses to practice law.
Trump runs his mouth unfettered and unedited and uncontrolled. He spent considerable time during a recent town hall on CNN stating for all to hear, including prosecutors far and wide, that he took classified documents from the White House, and also took the opportunity to potentially defame Carroll further.
If he’s being given legal advice not to talk, he is clearly not listening or he doesn’t respect the counsel being dispensed. Historically, Trump has done and said whatever he wants, presumably regardless of the legal advice being provided by his dozens of attorneys. And oftentimes that has occurred to his legal peril. When facing multiple cases and multiple investigations, some of which could result in years of incarceration in prison, a client like Trump should not be speaking publicly about the facts of a case or the circumstances underlying the basis of an investigation. But Trump? He’ll go on national TV and do it anyway.
It’s interesting that throughout all of the dirty laundry airing of the inner turmoil regarding his legal team, Trump has remained unusually quiet. Trump himself has not come forward to voice his support for any one attorney. So the public continues, with a combination of fascination and disgust, to watch the train wreck that is Trump Legal World unfold like a political iteration of The Hunger Games. Which attorney will be left standing at the end?
Trumps believes that he can change reality just by saying it. And it works on many members of the public, obviously. He’s also manages to slither out of one legal and financial scrape after another over the course of many decades so he believes that he’s invulnerable, especially now that he has tens of millions of followers and the threat of violence to use as an implicit threat. (And that is a formidable threat, it’s true.) It’s entirely possible that it will work for him again. If he has to pay civil damages or settle claims that’s fine. He’s done that many times. These criminal cases are more daunting, but I suspect he feels he could prevail in the end through appeals. I don’t think he really fears that he will ever see the inside of a jail cell.
So maybe he doesn’t think he needs good legal counsel.All he wants is his Roy Cohn who will go to the mat for him publicly and fight ruthlessly. I think he might believe that Boris Epshteyn is that guy.
Republicans are wringing their hands about Teflon Don
Oh heck. Maybe failing to push for the 2nd impeachment which would have barred him from office was a mistake. Oops.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ technology-challenged but donor-rich entry into the GOP presidential primary cemented his place in the early primary as the chief alternative to Trump.
But it will hardly clear the field. And with a growing cast of characters still waiting in the wings to announce their own campaigns, warning signs of a 2016 replay are once again flashing in the GOP. According to interviews with nearly a dozen GOP strategists, former candidates and party insiders, the intraparty dynamics now at play — and Trump’s own alchemical grip on the base — suggest a primary where a constellation of Republicans once again risk splitting the non-Trump vote in early nominating states.
“If those people are all still in the race when January comes around, it’s going to be 2016 all over again, and Trump will win,” said Jason Osborne, the New Hampshire House majority leader who has endorsed DeSantis in the primary, at a Rockingham GOP dinner this week where Nikki Haley served as the keynote speaker. “That’s just how it is.”
Even with DeSantis raising an eye-popping $8.2 million in his first 24 hours, the primary field is once again growing. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott entered the race last week. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, former Vice President Mike Pence and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu are making noise of their own possible bids.
“It definitely looks like a repeat of 2016,” said Jason Roe, who was a senior adviser to Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.
For Trump, the swelling field is just the latest dose of good luck for a politician who has for years played by rules afforded to no other candidate. He has seemingly become inoculated from blowback to scandals both major and minor that would threaten to fatally wound almost anyone else. The GOP graded his own pair of rambling and lackluster announcement speeches — both in 2016 and again in 2022 — on a curve that did not apply to DeSantis’ shambolic Twitter launch last week. While Trump skated, DeSantis’ launch threatened to become a metaphor for his campaign.
Before that, Trump fundraised off an indictment for paying hush money to a porn star, while DeSantis got lambasted for — glancingly and gingerly — critiquing Trump’s actions, saying he didn’t “know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair.”
While Trump gave Tucker Carlson a Russia-sympathetic answer on Ukraine, DeSantis caught unending flack for doing the same – for calling it a mere “territorial conflict.” Even this week, Trump golfed at his own club as part of a tournament there paid for by the Saudi-funded tour. He received no major criticism for doing so from any GOPers.
“Trump is a unique force in American politics, because people don’t look at him as a typical politician,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and former adviser to Marco Rubio’s 2016 and Tim Pawlenty’s 2012 presidential campaigns. “He seems to be held to different standards.”
He is also benefiting from the contours of the race — with a burgeoning field of competitors threatening to split the non-Trump vote.
“For those of us who view Donald Trump as an existential threat, we’re kind of tearing our hair out over this idea of a crowded field and a repeat of the same dynamics in 2016,” said Sarah Longwell, the Republican political strategist, and publisher of the Bulwark, which is critical of Trump and the MAGA movement.
It’s not as though the candidates getting in, for the most part, are knocking Trump down, either. DeSantis barely mentioned Trump in his campaign rollout, but in recent days has drawn some distinctions with the former president. But instead of the field of combatants railing against Trump, most are barely touching him — and more often than not, have aimed their fire at DeSantis.
In the hours before DeSantis announced his campaign, Haley and her campaign doubled down on criticizing the Florida governor — first putting out a video dedicated to portraying DeSantis as someone who is emulating Trump, and Haley in an interview with Fox later that day making disparaging comments herself about DeSantis “copying Trump.”
Scott, in a sit-down with NBC after his campaign launch event, deflected when asked about Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021. Not so when questioned about DeSantis, with whom Scott sought to draw distinctions on attitude and messaging. Vivek Ramaswamy has gone even further, actively defending and praising Trump while attacking DeSantis, to the point where some operatives have questioned whether he is part of the former president’s operation — a theory Ramaswamy flatly denies. Only Pence challenged Trump this week on his proposed changes to social security, telling the Des Moines Register’s editorial bid that “my old running mate’s policy is identical to Joe Biden’s.”
“Every person that gets into the race helps Donald Trump be the focal point of the race,” said Gregg Keller, a Missouri-based Republican strategist. “You would think it would muddy the water — in fact, it does the exact opposite. It focuses more and more attention on him, to the extent he’s beating these people, attacking these people, stealing the limelight in the way he wants to from these people.”
Trump will attempt to keep up with that show-stealing in Iowa this week, set to bracket DeSantis’ Iowa launch on Tuesday and events across the state the following day with his own visit to the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale and a Fox News town hall.
Joe Walsh, the former Republican congressman from Illinois who unsuccessfully ran against Trump in the 2020 primary, remarked on how DeSantis’ tepid early performance on the national stage has opened the floodgates for Republicans competing to be the primary field’s new No. 2.
“He’s been an unlikable son of a bitch. He’s not wearing well,” Walsh said. “So whereas the field would have been Trump and DeSantis, really, four or five months ago, now you’ve got all these other people who are getting in or are going to get in purely because they’ve seen the same thing … They’re all going to make the bet, well, ‘Fuck this. I’ll be the Trump alternative.”
It’s possible the size of the field will shrink before its size shapes the outcome. Ultimately, the race will come down to not how many are running now, said Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor who ran in the 2012 Republican presidential primary, but “the speed with which the field narrows.”
The risk for Trump-critical Republicans is if too many of them hang on for too long.
“The size of the field, if they’re all on the ballot when the voting starts, is going to be problematic if you’re someone who wants to pick a nominee other than Trump,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist who worked on George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. “Losing out 1 to 2 percent to 10 different people — it adds up.”
It’s kind of hilarious how everyone’s now talking about how fast the field will narrow as if that solves the problem. The problem is that Trump is still very popular with Republican voters. And the reason for that is because so many of these people enabled him over the last 7 years, especially by ta
A large majority of Americans want stricter gun laws. They are tired of seeing their kids mowed down on a weekly basis:
A majority of Americans in a new poll released on Friday said they would support stricter gun control laws.
Sixty-four percent said they were in favor of stricter laws, while 36 percent said they were opposed, the CNN-SSRS poll found.
A slightly smaller portion — 54 percent — said that such gun control laws would reduce gun-related deaths in the country, and 58 percent said they believe the government is able take effective action to prevent mass shootings.
Some 59 percent in the survey said they were in favor of banning semi-automatic rifles, while 94 percent said they would support taking measures to prevent convicted felons and those with mental health issues from owning guns.
Eight in 10 also said people under the age of 21 should be barred from purchasing any type of gun, the poll found.
Apparently, the problem is that Joe Biden isn’t doing enough:
We’re paralyzed by toxic gun culture that wants guns everywhere and for people to live their lives in fear or live their lives in self-imposed prisons to keep themselves safe. They have captured one of our political parties and the highest court in the land which in 2008 upended 250 years of constitutional understanding and created an “individual right to bear arms.” I’m not sure what the president could unilaterally do to fix that.
Trump Jr is actually more juvenile than his father.
He’s also an idiot:
On his online show “Triggered With Don Jr.” earlier this week, Trump’s son had a slip of the tongue during an extensive takedown of DeSantis, who he also referred to as a “failure to launch” with “the policies of a DC swamp rat” and a “nasal and effeminate voice.”
“Trump has the charisma of a mortician, and the energy that makes Jeb Bush look an Olympian,” Trump Jr. said in the gaffe.
Here’s an interesting view on some dynamics underlying the debt ceiling negotiations I’ve never seen before from Talking Points Memo. I can’t vouch for whether all these details are correct, but if they are it makes you wonder why nobody has been discussing it. Anyway, just throwing it out there as food for thought:
You were wondering how Biden was able to get such a good deal; in the end all this drama just amounted to getting the budget-negotiation process started early, with the GOP’s main takeaway being something (spending freeze) that their control of the House already guaranteed them via the tool of passing continuing resolutions.
Joe did a far better job than anyone imagined he could, for about the 79th time in a row. But that said, the key thing to recognize is that Biden’s hand was much stronger than anyone I read seemed to understand. What the media got right is, if a default destroyed the economy, that would hurt Joe/Dems in the general; even if people in some sense knew it was the GOP’s fault, they’d still mostly follow the heuristic “if things are going well, I’ll vote for the incumbent; if not, throw the bums out!”
But consider this: what if a default _isn’t_ devastating for the economy? And what if Joe and Kevin both know it? Well in that case, default is fine for Biden, because he can then blame whatever economic difficulties occur between now and Election Day on the GOP-created default! Of course not all such blame will stick, but the point is, if the default _doesn’t_ meaningfully damage the economy, then it’s a net positive for Joe’s re-election chances, because it means he’ll get at-least-a-little-bit reduced blame for whatever bad things (recession, slow wage growth, inflation, etc.) were going to happen anyway.
Presumably at this point you’re thinking, “sure, in that hypothetical Joe’s hand is strong, but we all know that a default would be a catastrophe surrounded by a disaster, wrapped in a calamity.” But do we? Take a look at the stock market — was it falling in fear of a crash as the deadline loomed? Not so much! Even better, look at the volatility index, or VIX, where investors can speculate on the probability that things get riskier. It’s near the lowest level since before the pandemic. The press focused on the fact that short-term Treasury bills reflected a significant default probability, but this is, in combination with the quiescent stock market and VIX levels, _comforting_ news. It suggests we’re not in the situation that default would be catastrophic but it’s unlikely. Rather, it says, sure, default might happen, but it won’t croak the market. Because if default is reasonably likely, as the T-Bill rates suggest, and default _would_ croak the market, then we’d have seen stocks drop and implied volatility rise. Since we didn’t see those things, it suggests the market thought default wouldn’t be a huge issue.
Now, by itself that’s not enough; financial markets aren’t always right. Though surely the disconnect between the panic in the press and the total calm of the markets was worthy of a great deal more investigation than it received. Journalists should have been asking themselves, “what do the markets know, or think they know, that we don’t?” Here’s a likely answer: if all else fails, the Fed can solve the default problem, and they don’t need a platinum coin to do it. All the Fed needs to do is… buy the defaulted bonds!
I know this seems so sinple as to be almost silly, but remember, buying bonds is something the Fed does on a regular basis; such activity is commonly referred to as “quantitative easing” or QE. It’s just absolutely normal for the Fed to make bond purchases. Of course traditionally QE meant buying the world’s safest assets, which is to say, rock-solid US Treasury bonds. Whereas _defaulted_ Treasury bonds are somewhat riskier. But not all _that_ much riskier, after all, everyone knows this debt limit thing will eventually get resolved. And ever since TARP and all the other activities surrounding 2008 and it’s aftermath, it’s become quite normal for the Fed to buy _risky_ bonds, corporate bonds and the like; the TA in TARP stood for Troubled Assets. Recall also that the Powell Fed committed to buy risky corporates during covid. It just wouldn’t be weird at all for the Fed to say: if you have a $1000 bond maturing June 15 and the Treasury doesn’t pay it, we’ll buy it from you for face value. the same with coupons.
In truth the Fed might well get fancier and just commit to _lend_ the face value of bonds to people, collateralized by defaulted Treasuries. There’s no doubt this is legal because this is _exactly_ what the Fed did during the recent regional-bank bailouts. Indeed a cynic might say they did it precisely so that no one could say, come June, that such an action is novel or legally sketchy — it literally just occurred a month or two ago and no one had any problem with it. I think the engineers call this a “smoke test.”
Now of course no one knows what the Fed would do in a default scenario. Certainly Joe would not actually _prefer_ to default and find out. But that said, I mean, can we really imagine Jerome Powell letting the global financial system collapse on his watch when he could easily address the problem employing tools he’s been using regularly since he took office? Almost for sure he would step up. The uncertainty is large enough to bring Joe to the negotiating table, but the near-certainty the Fed would save the day means Joe was holding aces. He could say to McCarthy: look, I’m boring old Joe, so you know I’m not _hoping_ for default. But if it happens, it’ll help me a bit in the general with 98% probability, and that’s sufficient to keep me from giving it all away in this negotiation. Rather, I’ll give you just enough so you can tell your supporters you won, and bring a reasonable fraction of the GOP House caucus. I’ll deliver the rest of the votes, and we’ll get back to business as usual.”
Although this email has been long by 2023 standards, recognize that it’s hugely oversimplified. The Fed bond purchases or loans do not, on their own, fully solve the problem; the Administration would need to take additional steps as well. But it would solve the bulk of the problem, and other needed steps are well understood; e.g. continuing “extraordinary measures,” issuing Treasuries to pay Social Security and Medicare under the 1996 law that allows borrowing above the debt limit for this purpose, and so forth.
The Administration had access to a layered defense which includes paying the bonds while shutting down the government as a stopgap, just paying everything and saying he had to choose between breaking one law or another and chose the less damaging option, and other approaches, with the Fed as a final backstop. But the Fed’s potential role is, I think, the key element left out of most discourse. Understandably the Fed wants the President and Congress to work this out so will swear up and down until the last minute that they cannot help. But this is obviously untrue; in fact the WSJ had a piece that glancingly mentioned how the Fed wargamed this scenario back in, IIRC, 2014. It’s an option, and security prices suggest Wall Street knows it, which means Biden and McCarthy know it.
And that, plus Joe Biden being a talented people person who’s been getting deals done in Washington for half a century, is good at it and knows he’s good at it, will, assuming this deal passes Congress, be the reason he once more made fools of all the doubters.
True? I honestly don’t know. But I have been very curious as to why the markets didn’t see this whole thing as an excuse to panic. They know these Republicans are batshit and that McCarthy is a dolt with a very tenuous hold on his crazies. It struck me as odd that they wouldn’t have reacted in the last week. But then markets are weird and if we could predict what they were going to do we’d all be as rich as Elon Musk. So take all this with a grain of salt.
A debt ceiling fight ending with a whimper not a bang
It’s not over yet, because Kevin McCarthy still has to round up enough votes to get past the Hastert Rule (GOP can’t bring a bill to floor with a majority of Democratic votes) and he might still face a motion to vacate the chair when all is said and done (which is his problem, not ours) it appears that creaky old Joe got the best deal we could have expected, most importantly an agreement to extend the debt limit until after the next election. Donald Trump hasn’t said a word yet. Whether he whips against voting for it is unknown. But you can bet he is not happy about it.
Here’s Dave Dayen at the American Prospect with the view from the progressives:
With one potentially major exception, the relative harm and help was kept to a minimum in the final agreement. It will only be a little bit easier to commit wage theft, or to sell defective or poisoned products. It’ll only be a little harder to get rental assistance or tuition support. Only a few people will be freer to pollute the environment; only a few will find it more difficult to get food. The Internal Revenue Service will only be a little worse. A lot of things will stay the same. Almost nothing will get any better.
That’s the broad strokes of a deal that the White House and House Republicans are selling to their respective bases right now. (House Republicans held a meeting immediately after the agreement was made last night; the White House isn’t holding anything for Democrats until this afternoon, after the bill text is supposed to be posted.) It will dictate federal spending on domestic discretionary programs for two years, and it will raise the debt ceiling for two years. After that, depending on the composition of Congress, we’ll all be here again. The stakes for the 2024 election just got even higher.
Imagine a world where we were a normal country with no debt ceiling, but everything else was exactly the same. Thanks to gerrymandering and the malpractice of the New York Democratic Party, Republicans still have the House, and the budget for the current fiscal year still expires on September 30. Republicans and Democrats would still have to negotiate that budget, and one likely outcome of that would be that negotiations fall apart, that there’s just no way to reconcile what both sides want. In that case, either the government shuts down or a continuing resolution is struck, which means that the government would operate at the current funding levels for a period of time. Maybe we’d live under a CR for the entire two years of this Congress.
That’s approximately what happened in this agreement. The funding levels for fiscal year 2024 on the non-defense discretionary side are at FY2023 levels. House Republicans are saying they clawed things back to FY2022, but a number of funding shifts—most prominently the return of tens of billions of dollars in unspent COVID aid—backfill the non-defense discretionary budget to get it to around FY2023. (The IRS money from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act also adds to this backfill, but while some reports still list that as a $10 billion fund shift, others put it as low as $1.9 billion, which is a little more than 2 percent of the total $80 billion outlay). This cap then rises by one percent in FY2025.
The goal here was to allow both sides to say contradictory things to their members. Republicans can say they achieved the target of the Limit, Save, Grow Act to limit discretionary spending to FY2022; Democrats can say they only froze spending at current levels. And both are sort of right.
Meanwhile, military spending, which is magic and has no impact on the federal budget, actually rises in FY2024 to the level in the Biden budget. (House Republicans wanted it even higher.) Veterans spending has similar privilege, and rises as well. Mandatory spending, like Social Security and Medicare, isn’t touched as well.
The New York Times estimates that this will cut $650 billion in spending over ten years, but only if spending rises at the rate of inflation after the caps lift. That’s highly uncertain: a Democratic government could restore all the cuts, while a Republican government could cut further.
In other words, not great, but not catastrophic.
Here’s Dan Pfeiffer on the politics:
Biden Outplayed McCarthy
Everyone can debate about how we got to this moment until the end of time. I wanted Democrats to include a debt limit extension in the Inflation Reduction Act. Like many others, including the Biden White House, I wanted the Democrats to use the lame duck session to take this legislative weapon of mass destruction off the table. Others wanted the President to ignore the debt limit and cite the 14th Amendment . There is a good faith debate to be had about the wisdom of abandoning the White House’s no-negotiation stance. But this is where we are. Once the House Republicans took over with a looming debt limit expiration, all good options were off the table. There were only suboptimal outcomes on the menu.
The President made a judgment that this budget process was the best way to avoid default and the outcome is better than many thought possible a few days ago.
The spending numbers demonstrate what would have happened this fall if the parties were forced to negotiate a budget agreement to fund the government for next year. Those sorts of cuts were inevitable the moment the Republicans won the House. Our most pressing needs are already underfunded, so these cuts will hurt people. The cuts represent the worst kind of opportunity cost. But once again, they could have been worse.
Budget caps expire after 2025. This is a massive victory when you consider that McCarthy demanded ten years of budget caps.
Joe Biden always says “Compare me to the alternative, not the Almighty.” No Democrat would choose this deal, but the alternatives were default or the “Limit, Save, Grow Act” passed by House Republicans. McCarthy told his allies that his bill was the floor, not the ceiling, of what they could expect by holding the global economy hostage. His proposed bill included devastating cuts in veterans’ health care, cancer research, education, and food safety. The GOP approach would have destroyed thousands of manufacturing jobs by repealing the Inflation Reduction Act.
None of that is included here.
I want to hold out judgment on the work requirements until I see the details, but based on what we know, Biden limited the damage demanded by the GOP.
There’s not much to love in this deal for progressives, but Biden seems to have preserved all of the climate funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. If that’s the case, it’s a big win.
The deal is not great, but it’s a far cry from what the Republicans wanted. Notably, the Republicans played their best card, and all they got was a suboptimal budget deal.
For the next several days, the President and his team cannot toot their own horn. McCarthy, a notoriously bad vote counter, still needs to round up a majority of his Far Right caucus. The MAGA media and Trump loyalists will crap on the deal and pressure fellow Republicans to vote no. Every triumphant tweet and attempt to tout the decency of this deal will make it harder for McCarthy to round up the votes. Therefore, the White House will remain quiet while the Republicans obnoxiously crow about how they took Biden’s lunch money. But if the White House can’t say it, I will.
Joe Biden played a very tough hand well. He got a better deal than many thought possible, and he forced the Republicans to adopt a series of very unpopular positions that they will have to own on the campaign trail next year.
There is nothing inspirational about “could’ve been much worse.” No one will run to the polls or volunteer to make phone calls because Democrats “limited the damage.” But the debt limit was President Biden’s first showdown with the MAGA Republican House. All things considered, he navigated it quite well.
Now, let’s hope McCarthy has learned to count votes since the last debt limit crisis.
I think Democrats should be careful about taking a victory lap because the wingnut snowflakes are very delicate and could balk. So, just between us: McCarthy told Fox News, “There’s not one thing in this bill for Democrats” but he is wrong. Biden got the biggest win of all although I’m not sure people realize how big it is. Agreeing to lift the debt ceiling past the election is huge. Trump wanted them to have this fight next spring so that he could fatuously claim that when he was president this chaos never happened (because Democrats aren’t terrorists) and throw the economy into turmoil before the election. That’s not going to happen. neither is a government shut down because they have agreed to fund the government for two years. All the arguments over the budget are over until after the 2024 election. That’s huge.
All that’s going to be happening until 2025 are idiotic culture war arguments and investigations, mostly criminal and mostly against Donald Trump and his cronies. I would say that gives Democrats the advantage. If the economy continues on its current path, they should be in pretty good shape to wage the battle.
A smattering of comments from this morning:
That’s what makes them truly happy. Making foreigners suffer and, in the process, make it easier for another pandemic to come and kill their own followers. Death cult.
What they’re saying about the vote:
That’s almost surely true. Matt Gaetz has been saying that publicly. The real question is whether six of them decide to flex their muscle and put McCarthy through another fraught speaker vote.
Oh my. Does Trump realize what McCarthy’s saying there????
Nothing is real
AI tools are the hot new toys every kid wants for Christmas. Just like crypto was the hot, new, get-rich investment? We gave a sidelong glance at using AI in political campaigns just last week.
The Atlantic‘s Russell Berman offers another take beginning with the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, practically begging Congress (in Berman’s telling) to regulate his industry.
Firms hyping the new tools name-drop candidates such as former Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman whose campaigns have used them already. But?
“I don’t remember anyone using AI for anything on that campaign,” Kenneth Pennington, a digital consultant and one of the Fetterman campaign’s earliest hires, told me.
Promoters pitch generative-AI as a way for small-time candidates to campaigns like the big kids, using it “to create digital ads, proofread, and even write press releases and fundraising pitches.” And to increase the number of targeted ads and emails you spend time blocking and deleting.
What the robots won’t do is retail politics:
Amanda Litman, the founder of Run for Something, an organization that recruits first-time progressive candidates, told me that the office seekers she works with aren’t focused on AI. Hyperlocal races are still won by the candidates who knock on the most doors; robots haven’t taken up that task, and even if they could, who would want them to? “The most important thing for a candidate is the relationship with a voter,” Litman said. “AI can’t replicate that. At least not yet.”
And the darker downside?
“We’ve democratized access to the ability to create sophisticated fakes,” Hany Farid, a digital-forensics expert at UC Berkeley, told Berman:
Nearly everyone I interviewed for this story expressed some degree of concern over the role that deep-fakes could play in the 2024 election. One scenario that came up repeatedly was the possibility that a compelling deep-fake could be released on the eve of the election, leaving too little time for it to be widely debunked. [Democratic Representative Yvette] Clarke told me she worried specifically about a bad actor suppressing the vote by releasing invented audio or video of a trusted voice in a particular community announcing a change or closure of polling sites.
But the true nightmare scenario is what Farid called “death by a thousand cuts”—a slow bleed of deep-fakes that destroys trust in authentic sound bites and videos. “If we enter this world where anything could be fake, you can deny reality. Nothing has to be real,” Farid said.
This alarm extends well beyond politics. A consortium of media and tech companies are advocating for a global set of standards for the use of AI, including efforts to authenticate images and videos as well as to identify, through watermarks or other digital fingerprints, content that has been generated or manipulated by AI. The group is led by Adobe, whose Photoshop helped introduce the widespread use of computer-image editing. “We believe that this is an existential threat to democracy if we don’t solve the deep-fake problem,” Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel, told me. “If people don’t have a way to believe the truth, we’re not going to be able to decide policy, laws, government issues.”
Bah, say consultants. Me? I’ve seen this movie too many times to be so glib:
Dr. Ian Malcolm : Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming.
Strawberry jam, Strawberry Fields. Nothing is real. It was more harmless in the 1960s.